Tim Freeze didn’t pay much attention when he heard that first blip on the evening news about a missionary plane being shot down in Peru last weekend.
“I knew it was a mission family,” he says, “but I kind of got the tail end of it. It was a shock that it had happened, but with the China thing and all the other stuff happening...
“And I was kind of busy, with getting the kids ready for supper and bed. ”
But the former maintenance supervisor at St. John’s Lutheran Church and his wife, Wendy and their children — six under 12 — are on the way to the mission field themselves, so it registered. He’d find out more when he had time.
And Wendy was shocked.
“My first reaction was that it was a very huge tragedy,” she says. “And I wondered which mission they were with and what kind of plane that was.” And she wondered about missionary friends on furlough from Peru and going back soon.
But it never occurred to either of them — now finishing their training as missionaries with the Wycliffe Bible Translators in Waxhaw — to question their own plans to leave in July for Papua, New Guinea, just north of Australia.
When they get there, Tim will work with construction and maintenance, building, repairing, doing anything that has to be done to support the work of the mission. Wendy has no specific assignment. She’ll be home with the children, but she’ll do whatever she can to support the mission program.
Both of them dealt with the questions of safety when they decided to go into the program two years ago.
“All the questions entered my mind,” Tim says. “I lived in Liberia, West Africa. My parents were missionaries. We didn’t have the freedoms we have here — or the securities.
“It’s kind of foolish to risk taking your family and children to another country where people don’t know you, where you’re a stranger putting yourself at risk for a lot of things,” he says, “without facing those things at the outset.”
They faced them when they learned about Wycliffe Bible Translators and its sister organization, Jungle Aviation and Radio Service, known as JARS, and began to wonder if they were supposed to be part of that mission.
The two organizations are committed to putting the Bible into the mother tongue of all people in the world. Of more than 6,500 languages known in the world today, nearly 4,000 — representing 400 million people — know nothing of the Bible.
So that means the translators and missionaries in JARS — those who support the work of the translators by doing all the other jobs, maintaining buildings and roads, handling materials, keeping supplies flowing, taking translators to their destinations — will always have work to do.
Tim and Wendy became aware of the mission when they were living in Salisbury. A friend, Dwayne Emberson, left a job with Food Lion so he and his family could go to Kenya with Wycliffe, which pays no salaries to its missionaries. Instead they look to God to provide funds for their living and ministry expenses through “partnerships” with individuals, families and churches.
“We started supporting them,” Tim says, “praying for them and sending them monthly gifts.” And they inquired of Wycliffe, wondering if maybe ...
They didn’t pursue the information they received then.
But later, when they had moved to Tennessee, they heard a speaker talk about the need for people to assess their lives.They went away for a weekend to go through the materials they’d received and pray about the direction their lives were taking.
“We were praying for God to send us some sort of sign, a message,” he says, “but we had no answers when we came home. We were a little disturbed. It was sort of, ‘You know, God, you’re going to have to tell us what you want us to do because we’re in a quandary here.’
“And the next day we got a letter from Wycliffe requesting that we reactivate our application process. The timing was sort of miraculous, and we took it from there.”
Since then they’ve had no doubt that they were called.
“And we had no doubt when that plane went down. We heard about it, saw it, but it didn’t shake our conviction.
“Jesus — God — died for everyone,” he says, “and everyone needs to know that. So that’s the risk. If God is calling us to do this, then we have to trust Him. People are killed every day on the highway and — this is not very theological — when your number’s up, you’ll go. When it’s not, you won’t.”
A plane crash, as tragic as it is, is temporal, adds Wendy.
“Missionaries take those risks for an eternal purpose,” Wendy adds. “The souls of others are what it’s for.”
“I viewed it,” Tim says, “as part of the territory — unfortunate, but it’s the world we live in. And I think God calls us to live in the world, but not of this world. People still go to the grocery store even though the statistics say the most dangerous place is within five miles of your house.
“We feel we’re not in any more danger than other people. It just gets reported more. It doesn’t hit the national news when it involves a doctor or newspaper reporter going about their business.”
“We’re going about God’s business,” Wendy adds.
They faced safety issues at the beginning.
“They let you know before you get into it,” Tim says, “that this is not sitting under palm trees drinking piña coladas all day.”
JARS planes in Peru have been grounded, but administrator Arthur Lightbody has indicated that this terrible accident won’t affect the goals there.
“They’ve set out to translate the word of God,” Wendy says, “and he said sometimes that’s slow, and sometimes they have to take precautions.”
But they won’t stop.
Neither will Tim and Wendy.
They and their children will leave in July if they get the final financial support they need.
“We’re asking people if they’d be interested in partnering with us financially and emotionally,” Wendy says, “and we’re still looking for $2,000 a month more than we have now. Our total need for our family is about $50,000 a year. St. John’s has been a huge partner with us.”
Churches from Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia — and many people in Salisbury — have pledged support as “partners.” And like all the other Wycliffe missionaries, they will stay in close monthly contact with their partners.
After they get to Papua, they’ll have 15 weeks of language training before going to work at Ukarumpa Center.
The official language in Papua is English. “But we’ll also have to learn ‘tok pifin,’ ” which is pronounced “tok pigeon” and often referred to as “pigeon English” because it’s a combination of the local language of the area intermixed with considerable English for words like “automobile” and “airplane,” which are not in that country’s language at all.
But whether they say it in English now or pigeon English when they learn it, their feeling is clear.
They’re not afraid.
Wycliffe missionaries are dealing in third world environments, Tim says.
“There’s always the possibility of danger. That’s the risk of spreading the gospel. Even Paul was shipwrecked.”
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